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State of the nation

Posted on 28 Jan 2009 at 15:59

Simon Brock looks at the future of open-source software in light of the economic downturn, but warns that not all free solutions are best.

This column has been a slight departure from my usual hands-on "how to do it" pieces, because I feel sure that the rocky economic outlook is likely to attract a lot more people to open-source solutions over the next year or two to save money, and they need to understand that such savings do not follow automatically. In some applications open source will save you money, in others it won't, depending on your particular context, and a lot of judgement and expertise is still required to know the difference. The most evangelical of open-source advocates can sometimes find it more appropriate to go commercial. But what open source does always offer is the chance to try things cheaply to see whether they work for you.